KIRKUS REVIEW

A dense but rewarding anthropological account of European
reactions to Islam and Muslim immigrant communities, and vice versa.

In Germany, reports the newsmagazine Bild, 110,000
jobs rely on the döner kebab—a Turkish version of the gyro, that is—alone. That
the food has been so widely accepted does not automatically translate into easy
acceptance of other Islamic artifacts, though, to say nothing of people. As
Ahmed (Chair, Islamic Studies/American Univ.; The Thistle and the
Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam,
2013, etc.) argues, this speaks to the enduring strength of tribal separatism.
The term “tribalism” has long been reserved for so-called primitive societies,
but “the classical attributes of tribes are present in modern European
societies, however heavily they are buried or disguised, in cultural norms,
language, rhetoric, symbolism, and assumptions of who ‘we’ are.” When such
tribes meet with Islamic ones with their own assumptions of ethnic identity,
then trouble is bound to ensue, as it certainly has, with many manifestations.
One, for instance, is the refusal of Turkish players on Hungarian soccer teams
to sing the national anthem—and no wonder, given that “the anthem depicts the
‘wild Turks’ as an excrescence, a ‘barbarian nation.’ ” It’s easy to see how a
Hungarian nationalist might react to such a response. Ahmed ventures that given
the experiences of Eastern European societies with predatory neighbors—i.e.,
Germany and Russia—such expressions of “primordial tribal identity” are not
unexpected. The author examines differing ideas of nationhood among the
European powers, such as the marked distinction between French and British
ideas of imperial management and citizenship. More pointedly, he considers how
Muslim immigrants with “a tribal background,” confronting prejudice and
discrimination, might develop primordial responses of their own to the insult
on their honor—responses that include being ripe for recruitment into terrorist
organizations, especially by way of “kinship and neighborhood links, as in
areas like Molenbeek in Brussels.”

Academic but of considerable interest to any student of current
affairs and geopolitics.

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